For a year he cut the lawn, and I never
knew his last name. I had to ask
the neighbor in the yellow
house after he vanished, her roses
dormant witnesses in the dark. When I’d tried
in terrible Spanish to explain where to plant the lavender,
my macete stumbled out machete
and he’d laughed behind black
cheap glasses, said, Police, bad,
they don’t like it. Words fall out
clumsy, twisted, and his surname—
we only cared when he’d gone. Then,
it was knocks on doors, furtive
asks in the night. For a week I watched
the online detainee locator site,
made calls that never came back.
The neighbor patrolled his church, carried
back stories of an avocado orchard
outside Tancítaro,unravelling
acres of drug cartels with fuerte-slick lips
where his father-in-law was murdered
last month.…
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On a late afternoon in February, as snow was just starting to stick to the highway, I had finished teaching my social psychology class at a university in Baltimore, Maryland and was driving to an evening game of tennis. I was fifty-nine at the time and I had played tennis for thirty-five of those years. I have a love affair with tennis, a sport that mentally transports me to a place where troubles and petty annoyances are lost in the sheer joy and focus of the game; what I imagined Csikszentmihalyi was talking about when he described the concept of flow.
My doubles partner that evening was a player new to the group. She was probably in her early thirties, around the age of my own daughter.…
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The fog-smothered dusk settling over Cretan Lake, Minnesota might have caused most sensible people to be more aware of their surroundings. Car exhaust fumes and damp garbage wreaths wrapped around pedestrians as they maneuvered around the gritty streets sprinkled with brown puddles and the occasional crushed Styrofoam cup or candy wrapper. A woman’s heels echoed in the distance with a clicking sound. Raindrops dripped steadily from gutters with a slow-ticking-clock rhythm.
A short, coarse fellow of forty-six, Mr. Smith had finished meandering about the Minnesota town, having already made his usual stops at the playground, City Park, and the school. His attempts for the day were futile considering the rain had poured down in sheets and no one dared brave it.
Now he stumbled up the slippery concrete steps to his third floor Saddle Square apartment, his egregiously large leather bag thudding softly against the back of his right thigh as he climbed each step.…
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First we’re asked if we want to change tables,
a free upgrade, the offer innocent
enough except we will find no Reward
Program exists. I don’t have to tell you
how many names I heard but remember
not one, instead recall the crow cocking
its head to look down at me from the dog
wood branch on the tree lawn, unusual
to see them perched so low unless they have
a reason, so I couldn’t listen, don’t
remember a word except the end was
the same, love just what some people feed on
before sending it away all confused
and feeling guilty for talking, thirst more
likely to keep you where you’re wanted than
a seat with a good view will make you move.
– Sandra Kolankiewicz…
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Jacqueline Berger’s first poetry collection, The Mythologies of Danger, selected by Alberto Rios, won the Bluestem Award and was published in 1998. It went on to win the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) Award the same year. Her second book, Things That Burn, selected by Poet Laureate Mark Strand, was the 2004 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize and was published through the University of Utah Press. The Gift That Arrives Broken won the Autumn House Poetry Prize was published in 2010, and some poems from the book were featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. She is a professor of English at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California and lives in San Francisco with her husband.
Bruce Snider, author of Paradise, Indiana comments about your latest book: “Everything has a place in Berger’s concise and compelling narratives as she examines intersections of memory and loss, exploring the infinite ways the past shadows the present.…
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85 degrees and dozing from the cough syrup
evening, too cool for the end of summer in the south
only one of us complains
where do we go from here
but back to where we always go?
the comfortable and the comforting
maybe it’s not so bad or the end
we’re here listening to frog songs
you can call mourning or jubilee
it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak the language
you’re lost in the pull of leaving light
maybe I’m just high from the rising tent of sleep
I tend to like endings
that hand over peace wrapped in swaddling
and ask me to walk gently
for as clumsy as I am
I do fall like feathers when I want to
I want to go gently
the sun, warm breeze
evening, 85 degrees
– Jeanna Paden…
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In a room that’s panther black and blizzard frigid, there’s a man hunched over his snapping fingers. The middle rests for a moment on the thumb and the peaks of the prints scratch together like sandpaper before the longer of the two slams down with mad might sending the shorter up and to the side. As the tall man slides across the tip of the pollex, the topmost digit bends and the small connecting area between it and the second highest grows increasingly sore, as does the meaty patch of palm just above the wrist. The snapping persists despite the ache because, without the crack, it’s just the spilled ink.
The atmosphere grows into its own person that crouches in one of the corners as the man stumbles around until his toes find his blanket.…
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